Nonsense. The Fed has collected the mandates of "maximum employment," "stable employment," and "reasonable long-term interest rates." It has given itself the entirely fictional and unprovable "goldilocks" rate of 2% price inflation. That is not central planning, comrade?
Quantitative Easing is a tool that the Fed used to fight the deflationary forces unleashed by the collapse of trillions in bad paper issued during the housing bubble.
And what caused the housing bubble? Wouldn't have anything to do with Federal interest rate policy beforehand, would it? And what did the Fed do when the housing bubble hit? They bought up $1.8 trillion of mortgage backed securities, thus bailing out all the major players - from Fed agencies to its owners on Wall Street. The Fed thus creates extreme moral hazard, among its many other faults.
What always surprises is that so-called conservatives, who believe in "free-markets" - and scream if the government meddles in the auto-industry, highly regulates prices and terms in the health care market, and would never accept bureaucratic central planning of the food supply - are so willing to ascribe honorable intentions and vast intelligence to those who centrally plan the most basic commodity of all - money.
Oh, and by the way, here is the “central bankers’ bank” admitting that central bank policies and particularly “unconventional monetary policies” of the last eight years are probably skewing wealth and income inequality
http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1603f.htm
“That is not central planning, comrade? “
Nope. But it was Congress pressuring the Fed to an inflationary bias, instead of using a strict price rule under the gold standard. Politicians like to meddle and will always push for easy money, it’s hard for a central bank to remain independent and do their job as they see fit.
“And what caused the housing bubble? Wouldn’t have anything to do with Federal interest rate policy beforehand, would it?”
That was one factor. The extremely low interest rates that Greenspan set in response to 9-11 had investors searching for yield. But the financial engineering of the 1990s was a factor, David Li’s Gaussian copula function was a factor, investment banks looking to farm the virgin subprime mortgage market was a factor, and maybe the dismantling of the last vestiges of Glass Steagall was a factor. It was more of a perfect storm than any one thing.
“And what did the Fed do when the housing bubble hit? They bought up $1.8 trillion of mortgage backed securities, thus bailing out all the major players - from Fed agencies to its owners on Wall Street. The Fed thus creates extreme moral hazard, among its many other faults. “
You should read Friedman and Schwartz’s ‘The Great Contraction’ to see why Bernanke did that. The alternative was to let a trillion dollars of bad paper implode the balance sheets of banks all over the world, which would have given us something much closer to the 1930s than what we got. By the time the Fed began QE the enormous damage was already baked into the cake and it was a matter of how best to keep it from causing a Great Depression 2.0. The time to have stopped this was circa 2003 when housing prices first began heading into uncharted territory. But no one would listen then.
As to your last point, banking is different from all other industries and the government has had some sort of control over banking since Alexander Hamilton set up our financial system in 1789.
Von Mises was as big a foe of bureaucratic central planning as there is, his philosophy being ‘praxeology’, independent human action, but I don’t recall him calling for an absence of government involvement in banking in his ‘Theory of Money and Credit’ which is his book about money and banking.